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An anonymous reader writes "'Right now, there are brilliant students from all over the world sitting in classrooms at our top universities,' President Obama explained to the nation Tuesday in his pitch for immigration reform. 'They are earning degrees in the fields of the future, like engineering and computer science...We are giving them the skills to figure that out, but then we are going to turn around and tell them to start the business and create those jobs in China, or India, or Mexico, or someplace else. That is not how you grow new industries in America. That is how you give new industries to our competitors. That is why we need comprehensive immigration reform." If the President truly fears that international students will use skills learned at U.S. colleges and universities to the detriment of the United States if they return home (isn't a rising tide supposed to lift all boats?) — an argument NYC Mayor Bloomberg advanced in 2011 ('we are investing millions of dollars [actually billions] to educate these students at our leading universities, and then giving the economic dividends back to our competitors – for free') — then wouldn't another option be not providing them with the skills in the first place?"

Meanwhile, they learn the local language and culture. They are more likely to do business with you. They are more likely to buy your products because they know them. International students are often more motivated to study, lifting the general class level.

This all depends on whether they assimilate or not. Some might very well be internally hostile towards their host country, or at least unwilling to adopt compatible values. In such cases, in a way it's even worse if they stay. This is most not often the case in the US, however. I'd wager most who gain an education here want to stay here and contribute. They should be allowed to.

Hey, all I know is if we had limited the foreigners coming into college when I was there....I might have had a fighting chance to get a physics lab instructor (grad student) that I could have understood when he spoke.

I was so frustrated, I mean physics to me was hard enough to try to grasp and learn...but having to try to translate what the teacher was saying made it doubly difficult.

I had to drop and retake a couple of times before I got a grad student who was teaching the class that didn't have an accen

Lecturer: "Today we taak abou daita modw and tupw cacuwus"
(followed by long string of chinese to the front row of foreign students)Students, row 1: lots of head noddingStudents, rows 2.. n: WTF!!?

80% of us failed that subject - which was really just basic SQL and database normalisation design etc. I scraped through but just barely - while getting distinctions and HD's in other subjects. Went well in the assignments, but you didn't pass the exam it was instant fail, regardless of your assignmnent marks. - and it didn't help that a good chunk of the exam was on stuff only in the lectures, not in the book.

Enough people failed that they went to the dean and tried to get the guy thrown out of teaching the course. Unfortunately there was no other chump willing to work for lecturers salary when those same skills were so much better paid out in industry, so they got the same guy the next year.

Fact is, having foreign lecturers is nothing new, and I went on to successfully catch up on the stuff I should have learnt in those lectures - so it didn't hurt in the long run, infact, when working in industry overseas later, it was a lot easier to work with and understand other nationalities better, having already had a fair bit of exposure to heavy accents. God knows my foreign language skills aren't exactly awesome, so you got to cut the lecturer some slack.

Main thing, is if you have a lecturer you really can't understand properly, *insist* on getting access to decent written lecture notes from him, or recordings that you can go through again later. One thing that lecturer was right about though - having good knowledge of SQL and database design really pays off.in industry.

All of the Mexicans immigrants know are hardworking and rarely take time off. If they were to adopt our values, they'd be much lazier. Statistically Mexicans work the hardest and the longest of all people.

Meanwhile, they learn the local language and culture. They are more likely to do business with you. They are more likely to buy your products because they know them. International students are often more motivated to study, lifting the general class level.

If they do in fact go home, (highly questionable), they more likely start selling stuff into your country, taking jobs away from locals. Buying stuff from France, (or wherever they were educated is usually not economically possible.

Meanwhile, they learn the local language and culture. They are more likely to do business with you.

The reverse is also true: US students will learn that there are people outside the US with different cultures and beliefs to their own and that, if they want to do business with them, they will need to take this into account. Since they provide this education for free to US students perhaps the question should be "Does the rest of the world owe the US an education?"...or we could just agree that its a mutually beneficial arrangement that we all learn about different peoples and cultures and leave it at that.

Yeah, but your point isn't in the vein of the slightly zenophobic summary, so noone else wants to engage with you *sigh*
An educated world is one less likely to have as many terrorists, reactionaries, etc., one more willing to use modern science and medicine to solve problems instead of war, but nooooo, it's too expensive, we should solve our own problems first, other countries should look after themselves *facepalm*
Why did Australia build schools in Indonesia under a conservative (for Australia) government? Because the best schools at that time in Indonesia were funded by Muslim Radicals, they had the best teachers, the best facilities, etc., so people sent their kids there even though there was a chance they'd become radicalised and join an extremist group. If you offer a good alternative people will use it.
The more educated\experienced people are, the more willing they are on average to sit down to solve problems, education is a way of imbuing people with knowledge from past generations so it doesn't take years of experience for them to realise violence should be a last resort.

and then giving the economic dividends back to our competitors – for free

US universities charge fees in the six-figure range. How is that 'for free' ?

perhaps the question should be "Does the rest of the world owe the US an education?"

And perhaps it should not. Why would it? A non-US citizen in the US barely has any rights, and a visitor is taxed at a flat 30% having to go through excessive paperwork to cut it down to almost 20%. By comparison, A US citizen in, f.i., the EU (and elsewhere) has several, like free (as in 'free beer') medical coverage, legal representation, even psychological support in most member-states, and elsewhere: services for which they would pay dearly in the US. Some have actually complained that they are exempt from the EU unemployment safety net, bitter for not being entitled to 'free money' after a couple of years of employment, and that they have to pay fees for education in EU institutions. Fortunately, they were laughed at, infused by generous doses of 'european' humor.

Local Junior College in Sacramento had this problem. The Fundie Ukrainians took over the student council and started persecuting people, funding ukrainian-only events, etc. They only got ousted after a rather public expose on this in one of the local newspapers which led to enough of the student body taking notice to vote them out of office (Also helped that volunteers started handling voting outside the usual midday period, which a lot of us missed due to having classes back to back during the voting period.)

Point being there's a lot of cultural clashes going on across the US, but as much as it could be considered a 'foreigner' problem, it's also a cultural shift towards apathy within the US population itself. It doesn't matter what ethnicity, cultural background, etc, the majority of people have become so lazy and apathetic that until someone makes a big deal out of political shifts that are happening, and it affects them either financially or personally, they won't take action to make any necessary changes to curb other people's anti-social activities, even if it's done using resources that are earmarked for public, rather than 'minority of public' purposes.

Make that Europe, not just France. We educate them for free, then they go to America because the pay is higher there to compensate for the huge student loans. I don't agree with the "Fuck socialism" sentiment though. Socialism provides all with equal opportunity, something that capitalism purports to but obviously does not. The fix is not to screw over people who get an education but cannot find work and pay off their loans.. the fix is to not saddle people with a massive debt as their introduction to the w

That's a fairly stereotypical (mis)-characterisation of socialism. But socialism is not about spending the money of the bourgeoisie. 'Socialism' per se is about the social ownership (via government**) of the means of producing wealth, which is to say the elimination of the bourgeoisie as a class of owners. Please note, this is not an endorsement of such an arrangement, which it seems to me has not exactly proved its viability in the real world.*** Then again Dr. Marx himself stressed that only the US or maybe Britain had the wherewithal to pull socialism off and said that if the Russians tried the would fuck it up.

[**Which distinguishes it from 'communism' where by definition, the state has ceased to exist and wealth is somehow held directly in the hands of the community. Smacks of the mystical to me, but anyway.]
[***The softer 'pluralist' form where state produces in competition with --or the Swedish model in co-operation with --private owners has had markedly better economic and social outcomes than any and all attempts at pure state production IMO^H^H^H.]

The merely moderately educated tend to confuse socialism with the welfare state. The historical fact that the modern welfare state was devised by conservatives (most notably by Bismarck) as an anti-socialist tool, sometimes explicitly so, seems to have disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole. To be fair this is in part because western "Socialist" parties have adopted the welfare state as a means to appease their constituency while shirking (sensibly?) the introduction of the revolutionary social change which their name, and sometimes their official party platform, promises.

Let us not forget, however, that in some western countries perhaps the largest --and certainly the most unrecognised --area of welfare spending by governments since WWII have been the various tax breaks (someone else pays) and positive incentives and aimed at encouraging private home ownership. This seems the very opposite of socialistic.

What would they do here? It's not like the education they've received is appreciated by American businesses. I just saw an ad for an IT internship that required a Bachelor's degree (Master's degree preferred!). Not working toward the degree... actually had the degree. (My favorite example is the car rental agency that insisted on a four-year degree as a requirement to work the counter at the local agency; I'll bet those grads were glad they busted their tail in college for that plum job.) American corporations are seriously delusional nowadays.

Not delusional - they just have the advantage. They can afford to ask for overqualified candidates, because there is a surplus of applicants at all qualification levels, scrambling over each other in the frantic rush to grab a job - any job at all, so long as it pays the rent.

No, delusional. "Overqualified" is usually a bad quality to have in an employee. It means they're not fully using their abilities, will be bored at the job, and will ultimately leave as soon as better prospects present themselves.

Specifically and deliberately staffing your company with overqualified employees is a recipe for poor performance and high turnover. Anyone who thinks that's a good idea is delusional.

Ditto for Java back in the day. Even James Gosling didn't have enough Java experience for many of those job ads. Of course, I've heard claims that job ads like that are actually posted when they don't really want to fill the position (or at least don't want to fill the position with the people who will see the ad). I'm not sure which would be worse: hiring managers being that ignorant, or hiring managers being that hostile.

I also heard it was a ploy for H1-B. "we got no qualified American applicants, but 1,000 from India that claimed 20 years experience with Windows 2000 in 2003. So we need more H1-B visas for these exceptional candidates."

There is exactly one Ponzi scheme which works: immigration. This is the real source of the US's riches. Generations upon generations of immigrants building their lives and enriching the country. Why do you think your country is rich? Natural ressources are good, but you are not Saudi Arabia, and that's a good thing too. The institutions are good but not great, although they are extremely stable. The infrastructure is pretty crummy. The primary educational system has pretty dismal outcomes. But new generations of immigrants bring in their skills and motivation.

Higher education is good, and the spillover in new industries drive the new economy, but you know the joke: "what is a Russian professor teaching Indians and Chinese students -- A US University classroom". Immigration is the key there. Again, it is a Ponzi scheme, new generations generating the wealth to sustain the older ones.

But this is a good and virtuous one! Embrace it: it makes the US vibrant compared to Old Europe, and I say that as a European rather found of my continent!.

One of the major reasons the US is rich is because the rest of the world has been using US dollars they receive to buy and sell oil instead of using them to buy US goods and services. It's like if I write a cheque to pay my landlord, who doesn't cash it, but uses it to pay his mortgage, and the bank uses it to pay their employees, and so on, without anyone ever cashing it. The wealth of the US comes at the rest of the worlds expense, for the most part, and they stablize and extend the system with their war machine.

With China now selling oil and natural gas in renminbi and Russia giving China unfettered access to their natural resources, there are going to be some pretty dramatic changes in store for the American people, and most of them don't appear to even have a clue.

They're going to need immigrants desperately, though, because they have a demographic imbalance that's going to leave them with too few young people to maintain things and care for all the retiring boomers.

If they were to close their doors and try to go it on their own, they would be so completely fucked that it's laughable to think about.

And the standard of living of the rest of the world would go up dramatically.

our riches are built on two weak neighbors and an ocean that kept the war out in the 1930s/40s. We were the only ones that didn't get blasted into the stone age when mechanized warfare happened. The middle class (which is largely what people mean when they say 'our riches') was an accident following WWII. Pretty much everyone fought in the war and they came back war heroes entitled to a bright future. That plus fear of communists seizing your factory kept good paying jobs here. Well the baby boomers are retired and the current war vets are coming home to Walmart jobs. The US isn't vibrant, it's rapidly dying as a bunch of ppl with low self esteem and the opposite of an entitlement complex race to the bottom.

What makes American schools the best in the world (especially at the graduate level) is that they admit the best students in the world. Stop admitting the students, and the schools will no longer be the best. It's that simple. Furthermore, top professors/researchers choose their universities on the basis of where they have access to the best students, which makes this proposition a vicious cycle. So, American schools would lose their edge in less than a generation.

Concerned US citizen here with a question for you: why would we want to do that?

I take it you prefer to have your population dominated by uneducated burger flippers instead of college graduates? That's why the US is such a mess these days. You value ignorance. You look down on people who know and think about things. Hell, you throw 'em in jail.

I take it you prefer to have your population dominated by uneducated burger flippers instead of college graduates?

The US isn't such a mess because we are uneducated, we do not value ignorance...

At least two of your states are trying to find a way to do away with teaching evolution. Compare your college STEM budget with its football team's budget. Who do the girls go for first? The football team. Who do bullies go for first? The smart kid who shows 'em up in class. On balance, yes you are uneducated, and you do value ignorance.

You speak down to burger flippers like they are uneducated...

I was specifically talking about uneducated burger flippers. I've suffered many a "gap job" myself through the years, hating damned near every minute of it but having

... except that bona-fide work visas for random foreigners are pretty hard to come by. For many international students, a student visa is the only way to be in this country until they graduate, after which if their grades were good enough they have a shot at an H-1B or a sponsored visa. Then there are the schools that are diploma-mills whose main purpose is to allow their students to work in "practical training" as soon as possible...

Not necessarily. For undergraduates, yes, international students pay a ton of tuition. For Graduate students in these STEM fields, most of them are not paying a dime for school (fellowships/assistantships). However, they are then providing cheap academic labor.

International students are the ones that are paying full price for our universities, and they're the ones that keep our universities funded.

Universities court international students like it was nobody else's business.

A good part of the US GDP can be traced to actually selling higher-level education to international students. Consider that each international student brings in $50k+ to the US GDP, and multiply that by the number of students per year. It's easily a bigger industry than Hollywood.

I'm surprised that Government doesn't allow more sales of education to international students. Our economy could use that money.

Foreign money really does grow an economy. Consider also that in the 90's, the immigration door was wide open. Millions of people came to America. Now consider that each one needs to buy a house, at $100k+ each... you could pretty much explain the incredible GDP growth back in the 90's by our open border policy back then, and you saw how it hit our economy when we closed the borders after 9/11.

For undergraduate degrees, yes, we do. But the main point is for advanced degrees in STEM. For graduate students, yes, tuition is still charged. The university gets paid whether you are international or not. The question is: Who pays?

It may surprise you that most STEM graduate students don't pay for their own tuition. In fact, most get paid out of some grant money somewhere. So, in effect, the American Heart Association, or the National Institutes of Health, or the National Science Foundation, etc, etc, will pay a professor at a university to study a problem. The professor then hires a graduate student to work on said problem. The professor takes the grant money and pays the student's tuition and a small salary. So, in effect, US organizations and taxpayer dollars fund an overwhelming amount of international students. This is fine, the professors, universities, and various agencies want to attract the best talent, and it's a worldwide marketplace.

Now, the real kicker is that after they graduate with a masters or doctorate, we make it difficult for them to stay here if they want. There should be an easy path in place for recipients of advanced degrees at US universities to stay here if they want. There's not. An awful lot of them are sent back home against their will. So I ask you: What is the point of bringing someone to this country, funding their education, and then demaning that they return home?

It's worth pointing out that it goes the other way too. Any doctoral student from the US working/studying at a lab somewhere else will most likely be supported by grants to that lab, not with money from the US.

This argument would be pretty sound if the US had free tertiary education. People would come, get an education at the US taxpayers' expense, and leave, benefiting other countries. That would indeed suck.

However, US tertiary education costs are astronomical, particularly for international students. Assuming they are paying their way (i.e. covering the full cost of delivering their degree), then what's the problem? They inject money into the US economy (both through tuition and simply buying stuff while

Frankly, I'd prefer if more foreign students went back to where they came from to improve their own communities. I am amazed by the percentage of medical doctors in the USA who immigrated from third world countries and now earn their livings soaking middle class Americans. I want my doctor to actually care about my health, not just his bottom line.

And why would an American-born doctor be more likely to do that than a foreign-born one? He's stuck working in the same broken healthcare system that funnels profits to insurance companies over doctors.

There is a clear difference between 'US' and 'us': one is a capitalized abbreviation and the other is not so, UNLESS YOU ARE SHOUTING the difference is clear.

I've never understood why english titles capitalize every word either.

English titles do not capitalize every word 'small' words like 'a', 'the' and 'of' are not capitalized except at the start of the title. Americans, on the other hand, divided their country into states so they could have more than one capital and have an economy based on capitalism so it's perhaps not surprising that they like to capitalize every word

The way this submission is crafted invites a flame war, but ok, let's tackle it.

The submitter is evidently not aware that the vast majority of international students pay full freight and then some when they attend a US school. So, in the small picture, that's why US universities market to them, at a time when US students are having difficulty ponying up (for a variety of reasons), and state legislatures are cutting funding for the public institutions.

Bigger picture, yes, we're educating the competition, but we're also familiarizing the next world elite with US culture much as the British used to, making the world ever more US-centric. Given the economics for the schools, believe me, these students are going to come. So, we might as well make it easier for them to stay AFTER we've educated them, and thus allow them to add value to the US (culturally, economically) over the long run. If we create the brains, why encourage them drain back out into the world?

Possibly, depends on whether their home country gave them a grant or not.

But, in any case, in most countries it's common practice for citizens to pay, grant/etc subsidized or not, a reduced, possibly subsidized rate for education, and for foreigners to be charged a much, much, higher rate that the institution makes an actual profit on. That appears to be the case in the US.

The fees foreign students pay subsidize education for Americans. They reduce the amount of money needed by taxpayers to pay to Univ

Actually, the global corporationss want them kicked out once they learn. This then provides a low cost pool of skilled workers in the "off-shore" countries.

Why would Global-Mega-Corp inc. want those skilled workers to stay, where they'd be subject to better pay and conditions? The corporations aren't interested in helping the US/EU/AU/CA economies, they want cheap labour for the bottom line.

1. It misses the benefits of having foreign students in the US, and having our own students exposes to students from other countries without needing to travel (so those who can't afford the time/money to travel still get more exposure). These benefits are far reaching. If we became a country with world class universities closed off to non citizens - we'd rapidly feel a diplomatic bite, and face more insidious harm long term.

2. A college education is more than just job training, and the perspective and growth it provides are only allocated to a small portion of the populace. We need to be talking about making college as universal, free, and affordable (for society) as high school. Then we'll see some real progress.

At the graduate level...most of these international students get a full ride. At least that's how I've seen it done. Nothing wrong with that...let's just make sure we keep them here to make the USA stronger rather than give them the boot.

2. A college education is more than just job training, and the perspective and growth it provides are only allocated to a small portion of the populace. We need to be talking about making college as universal, free, and affordable (for society) as high school. Then we'll see some real progress.

I think that's the main problem. College in the US has become the trade school for high tech jobs and professional sports players. There are still a few universities that emphasize intellectual pursuits above practical ones, but they are usually the most expensive. I don't think I'm the only one seeing the trend that is leading us to the new dark ages. Bread and circuses, as Rome burned.

College in the US has become the trade school for high tech jobs and professional sports players. There are still a few universities that emphasize intellectual pursuits above practical ones, but they are usually the most expensive. I don't think I'm the only one seeing the trend that is leading us to the new dark ages.

Modern colleges and universities (I.E. pretty much anything from the Middle Ages onwards) historically started as trade schools - and that's what they've been ever since. The purely 'intelle

#1 is especially great. When I was in grad school for computer science, almost all of the office mates I had over the years were international students from India or China, and we were able to share a couple of great cultural experiences thanks to the time we spent together. While I do have fond memories of coming up with algorithms to solve problems that hadn't been solved yet, I have far more fond memories of us comparing notes and sharing aspects of our cultures.

For instance, in one conversation I had with an Indian friend, we realized that even though we were both referring to an animal called an "ox", we were talking about very different animals (mine was more like a cow, whereas his was more like a water buffalo). And I remember the shock on his face when, after talking about animals that are local to different regions, I offhandedly mentioned that we don't really have monkeys in America. Despite the fact that he had been living in America for a few years, he apparently hadn't realized he had never seen one in the wild, and that realization came as a complete surprise to him, since he had grown up most of his life with monkeys around him in the same way that I grew up with squirrels around me.

Then there was the time that my Chinese office mate had me over for dinner with his roommate. To say the least, while I was aware that American Chinese food wasn't authentic, any notions I had left were blown out of the water when they served up that meal. We were able to have a friendly conversation (during which they continually complimented me on my chopstick skills (which I always thought were rather decent), despite the fact that they were easily 3-4x faster than I was with them) about censorship and our perceptions of how each other's governments are engaging in it, which was rather enlightening for both of us. And in return for their hospitality, I invited them to join me and my family for Thanksgiving. As we were pulling up and they saw the neighborhood, they were convinced I was from an extremely wealthy background and were a bit surprised when I revealed that my family is pretty solidly in the middle-class. They took pictures of all the various decorations my parents had put up, be it plastic plants or the curio cabinet my parents keep in the corner of the living room, neither of which they understood the purpose of. Things that we would take for granted, but which seemed entirely...well...foreign to them.

I also discovered prior to the trip home that neither of them were aware of what a turkey was, so I made sure to sit down with them in advance and show them a picture of what it was (my parents had an unfortunate incident a few years prior, when they had a family from the Philippines and Indonesia over for Thanksgiving, only to discover partway through the meal that they apparently kept turkeys as pets), yet their eyes nearly bugged out when they saw just how huge the bird was as it was coming out of the oven. And while some of the food clearly wasn't to their tastes (which was to be expected), they LOVED the homemade cranberry relish that my family makes for each Thanksgiving (to be fair, we like it too, which is why we keep making it).

For me, I remember enjoying conversations over language the most. We'd discuss various odd constructs in Hindi, Mandarin, English, Japanese, or other languages and then talk about how they were handled in each. It was especially interesting to discuss English with the Indian students, since their background was in British English, which has a few grammatical differences from American English that none of us realized until they presented themselves (e.g. saying "he got off of the bus" and "he got on of the bus" sounded equally ridiculous to them, whereas the first one would sound just fine to an American).

Perhaps the most valuable lesson I received, however, was during my first week of grad school. I recall being concerned that I'd be going head-to-head in my classes and research against the best and brightest from around the world, and while some

The current situation does inure some benefits to the U.S., but in not easily measurable ways which is why they're not talked about all that much.

My observations when I was a college student was that international students would gain a perspective on the U.S., Americans, our life, and our culture which was different from what they expected when they first arrived. I assume when they went back home that this new perspective would cause them to evaluate their own local press and government statements about the U.S. in light of their first-hand experiences and knowledge. I had lab partners from Saudi Arabia, Ghana, and mainland China, all of whom I was able to talk with about perspectives and impressions of the U.S., and I have no doubt that each of them had a more nuanced and healthier view of the U.S. after having lived here.

If you want to stabilize relations with China and various Muslim areas of the world I think we'd be well served to invite far more of their students to study here so that when they go back home they can correct the thinking of their friends and family. Likewise the Americans who have a chance to study with them will realize that by and large "people are people", dispelling the simplistic "us versus them" mindset we seem to be afflicted with.

Maybe instead of standing in the way of entrepreneurs (no matter where they're from) why not remove as many obstacles as possible from business start-ups? Maybe an "incentive visa" for starting a company and hiring Americans, with a fast track to citizenship?

If the President truly fears that international students will use skills learned at U.S. colleges and universities to the detriment of the United States if they return home... then wouldn't another option be not providing them with the skills in the first place?

It is if you think less education and less freedom in the world is a good thing.

It's our competitive advantage that the best and brightest young people from all over the world want to come to the USA to study. It helps us to brain drain the rest of the world for our own benefit. We should do more to keep these people in the USA when they graduate. Most want to stay. Even in cases where they do go back to their own countries, we gain soft diplomacy by exporting our way of life to other parts of the world.

They are earning degrees in the fields of the future, like engineering and computer science...We are giving them the skills to figure that out,...

Mayor Bloomberg advanced in 2011 ('we are investing millions of dollars [actually billions] to educate these students at our leading universities,...

Giving? Seems like they're paying us, investing in our universities, to study and earn their education. They pay for a service/product US universities are providing. Isn't that how Capitalism works? Sure, we could provide them access to our educational system, but who's going to pay the schools then?

When they have no future in their native countries due to lack of education, they can turn their skills to violence, criminal activity and terrorism. We can then spend the billions used to educate and spread "OUR CORE" values peacefully to other countries on defense contractors. Fly drones and blow them up them up at home. Thus our economy grows and we keep our values right where they belong, here is the good ol US. Makes sense to me and very Progressive. BHO is making me ashamed I voted him.

At least from my observations, most people think the guys going to college in the states from overseas came here on a raft. In fact, all of the foreign students I met were from well-off to outlandishly rich families (3 Saudis I met of a group of maybe 10). The poor foreigners are the guys doing the lowest-rung work in our economy while the middle class guys are those small shop or restaurant owners. I'd say at least 95% of the foreign students I've met meet my description.

then wouldn't another option be not providing them with the skills in the first place?"

Spoken like an american who has no clue how good he has it, which is saying a lot given how terrible US education is.

In India, or China or the middle east, assuming the program you want exists there are far more qualified applicants than there are places. So that's the first hurdle. Those spots may be decided by bribes, clan, political connections, or gender. And not 'oh they bias admission to black slightly' I mean 'they don't let you in if you're a woman' kind of bias.

Once you're there you have a problem. All of those political connections, bribes, clan loyalties etc. determine who gets the test questions in advance, and who doesn't. The US system, for all of its faults is relatively honest. If you get a 70% on an assignment then you can be reasonably sure that the identical assignment submitted by someone else should have gotten about 70%. And not 100% for being in the right clan, or 0 for not paying the right bribe to the right person today.

You can't just 'give people skills'. Skills come from practice, honest evaluation and actually being taught something related to the skills you are trying to learn. Those things are work, sometimes hard work, and they cost money. Which is why some places regularly charge a huge amount of money for foreign tuition. You aren't going to become a good programmer by watching youtube videos, and you have no way to prove you know how to program if no one will honestly asses your work. That's why the very best and brightest from a lot of places get sent away: because even their own governments don't trust their own education system.

The problem is not about preparing brillant foreign students. Is not preparing brillant local ones because they can't pay for education, or prefer not to risk owing money for the rest of their lives getting it. Or even worse, preparing dumb, or not motivated enough because they have already their economic life ensured.

Worse than using it in someone brillant from some other place (you probably are enjoying something designed or invented at least in part by someone from other country), is giving it to just a

Hosting top foreign students is about as close to "win/win" as you get, depending on how it's managed. They pay tuition. They do research. They spend money on basic necessities while here (rent, food, etc.). Sometimes, if we're lucky, they stay here after graduating and become citizens. Highly paid citizens who are likely to contribute more in tax revenue and economic activity than they consume in govt. services. That is to say, the exact type of citizen we want to attract.

To say that international students pay more tuition and therefor pay their own way is overly simplistic as all of the grounds, buildings and other infrastructure were paid not only by tuition but by donations and state/federal funding at some point.

In practice the US benefits by being able to select the best foreign students, sells them overprices education at a tremendous cost and then it will have the opportunity to keep a good percentage of them.

And of course it would be much more dangerous for the US to reject this slice of the world population, because they would be perfectly able to build a similar teaching / research structure if they would need to...

At the undergraduate level, there's no "problem," as none of the US government-backed or university-backed financial aid programs support nonresident foreign nationals. Our universities take their tuition money and provide an education.

The issue would be at the graduate level in the sciences and in engineering. But we need to be extremely careful about exactly what is being paid for. First set aside fellowships, which also don't apply to nonresident foreign nationals. The absolute standard practice is that

First of all, the US does not have a monopoly of good schools. Europe has many good schools, and there are schools that provide competent college-level education all over the world. Closing the doors of US universities merely directs the demand to these other good schools, and would probably not substantially decrease the creation of competition.

Secondly, the US has a moral obligation to many countries, having terribly damaged their institutions and infrastructures over years of intervention. Even if the US

I came to this country to attend university and nothing was handed out to me. I paid full tuition and all living expenses out of my pocket. So, I actually brought money in and helped the US economy. Not only that, but after getting a degree, I STAYED and became a heavily taxed US citizen. So, not sure what the point of the article is.

"... That is how you give new industries to our competitors. That is why we need comprehensive immigration reform."

IIRC this kind of immigration reform was recently tried in the UK (although I'm not sure if it was actually implemented). The idea was that the government wanted to stem the tide of immigrants, but couldn't really hope to achieve that aim, because most of them were entering legally from other European countries. So, they sought to restrict the number of foreign students in the UK. But, then

Yes, all those 15 million illegals that crossed the Southern border, along with their offspring are hard at work studying and excelling in various STEM disciplines so that they can help build a better USA. "Fields of the future?" I think it's more likely that they're working in the fields right now.

I've got nothing against hard working immigrants. If I was in their shoes, I'd be doing the same thing. I blame the federal government for a deliberately failed immigration policy.

This is the most blatant lie I have read in a long time. US has benefited enormously from the influx of highly educated immigrants, whose education was paid for other countries. The US got them FOR FREE...

I bet that there are many, many more fully-educated foreigners coming to US than people who pursue their "cheap but good-quality" (really?) education in US then move abroad to benefit other nations.

The ones who peddle the idea stated in the summary are either disingenuous or don't know how good they have it.

The context of these remarks is immigration reform. I think the point is, "if they come here for an education, we should focus on attracting those people so they STAY here, and contribute to the US economy." They come here, pay thousands of dollars in tuition, and then take all the valuable skills and knowledge they've acquired, and leave the US... which doesn't really help the US expand its economy - they're not starting companies here, paying taxes here, and creating jobs here.

They come here, pay thousands of dollars in tuition, and then take all the valuable skills and knowledge they've acquired, and leave the US... which doesn't really help the US expand its economy - they're not starting companies here, paying taxes here, and creating jobs here.

Somehow, I think the thousands of dollars, which is more like 10s of thousands of dollars in tuition in addition to 10s of thousands of dollars in living expense, is a significant shot in the arm to the US economy.

Especially when you have to consider that if they stay, and manage to get a job, or start a business, they willa) recruit people from their own country to move over for marginal wages, orb) start their own "foreign aid" program, exporting cash back to their family over seas rather than spending it

Each year, billions of dollars are sent by migrant workers to their home countries, with some estimates putting the total value of remittances at more than $200 billion. For some countries, remittances make up a sizable portion of GDP.

Since 1996 they have been worth more than all overseas-development aid, and for most of the past decade more than private debt and portfolio equity inflows. In 2011 remittances to poor countries totalled $372 billion, according to the World Bank (total remittances, including to the rich world, came to $501 billion). That is not far off the total amount of foreign direct investment that flowed to poor countries. Given that cash is ferried home stuffed into socks as well as by wire transfer, the real total could be 50% higher.

Remittances are playing an increasingly large role in the economies of many countries, contributing to economic growth and to the livelihoods of less prosperous people (though generally not the poorest of the poor). According to World Bank estimates, remittances totaled US$414 billion in 2009, of which US$316 billion went to developing countries that involved 192 million migrant workers. For some individual recipient countries, remittances can be as high as a third of their GDP.... A majority of the remittances from the US have been directed to Asian countries like India (approx. 66 billion USD in 2011), China (approx. $57 billion USD)and Philippines (approx. 23 billion USD)

Next time, before you burn a whole mod point, do just a tad of research.

Then maybe we should figure out why that is, and fix it, rather than continuing to import the droves of internationals who take university positions away from residents of this country.

Keeping internationals here for the sake of Academia is such a biased and stupid opinion to have. In engineering you are literally only relevant until people graduate. You should not be dictating policy for your sake alone.

If I can't get a job in Europe because they have to prove that there is no national qualified to do the

Do you have any idea how empty that would leave our campuses? (Not to mention our faculty offices...)

BTW: I teach at University level.

That is a nice thought - we can only hope it would play out that way. Currently kids either have to come from some serious wealth, have truly exceptional high school records, or be part of a minority group to get into most Universities. BTW: I have kids in high school and have been looking into it lately.

Hey, if it also emptied out faculty offices then it could help solve our unemployment problems a bit as well!

Kinda of a rant but in part I agree. Obama seemed to overlook the outsourcing as well. If graduates do stay in the States, and then become CEOs (eventually...) then market dictates will suggest that they 'rightshore' the jobs off to China/India/Egypt.

Maybe trading prices could factor in the floating bodies in the streams, worker safety, human rights, pollution levels... but if it doesn't have to, then it won't. And it doesn't have to.

Seems like everyone is implying that US Citizens are too dump to do STEM

Too smart to do STEM. You'll end up $100K in debt unemployable past age XYZ due to ageism, any position in industry is gonna get outsourced probably to employees of the foreigners in your CS program (in america your boss in industry will be an art history BA degree holder, making twice as much as you might I add, not a foreign PHD). The good news is although we massively overproduce PHDs there are job openings at that level for like maybe 20% of them, so there's at least a chance you'll get a PHD level jo